Today for many information workers, the Internet is a data source rich in business data that is constantly updating and growing. Over time, the amount of data available via the Internet has grown exponentially. Unfortunately, due to the rapid growth of available data, data mining has become less user-friendly. Additionally, much of the data available over the Internet is in a constant state of change, being regularly updated by content providers. To compound the problem, many content providers regularly change the style, structure, or even the hypertext markup language (HTML) used to encode the Web pages that make the data available.
As the number of content providers and the volume of data increases, tools to effectively manage, sort, and manipulate Web data will become even more useful. Unfortunately, no tools exist for managing data that can handle the ever-changing Internet. Existing spreadsheet applications require significant user input to select Web data to be imported, and have limited ability to import data from more than one Web document. Accordingly, there is a need for a user-friendly application that can automatically import data from one or more Web pages.